IN THE 2019 General Election, turnout in East Lothian was 72 per cent; 69 per cent voted in the Scottish Parliament election in 2021.

The SNP won twice, with PR electing regional Labour and Tory MSPs at Holyrood. This is representative democracy; yet by Thursday, two candidates will have emerged for Prime Minister after acrimonious Westminster infighting, secret hustings and MPs’ ballots.

Tory party members, 56 per cent of whom live in London and the south-east, with just six per cent in Scotland, will decide who will lead the UK. A Brexiteer zealot will control the future of Scotland, where 62 per cent voted to remain. With hand on heart, how many who voted No in 2014 recognise this as democratic?

Largely strangers north of the Border, the leadership contenders have offered zero evidence of respecting the will of the people of Scotland and our elected Parliament.

Candidates have committed to having a ‘bonfire’ of EU regulations that sustained UK prosperity for 40 years; breaking the ‘yellow wall’ of Scotland’s democracy; withdrawing the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights; deporting refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda; and backtracking on climate change ‘net zero’. Unionist confidence that Tories value Scotland’s role within the UK isn’t rewarded with indications that contenders aim to embed and strengthen Scottish democracy.

The dominant Brexit faction has overwhelmed ‘one nation’ Tory traditions.

David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum, Theresa May failed to get her Brexit deal through Parliament: both resigned. Boris Johnson’s fantasy ‘oven-ready Brexit’ and lack of integrity lost the Tories’ confidence: he also resigned. Brexit’s benefits are so vanishingly few that Jacob Rees-Mogg requires a new Government department to help him find them.

Brexiteers hate the allegedly undemocratic EU, yet the EU allows members to leave, while the UK, having ‘taken back control’, will hold Scotland hostage by denying us the right to vote on UK membership.

Presenting the Scottish Government’s paper on democracy and independence, the First Minister said: “Parties and policies we reject are forced upon us, but the democratic right to choose an alternative is denied to us”.

Can we move Scotland forward from this double democratic deficit? The answer is yes.